Katherine Kurtz

Katherine Kurtz, best known for her Deryni fantasy series, was born during a Florida hurricane, and likes to regard this as an auspicious introduction to the world. She read honours humanities at the University of Miami, where she received a B.S. in chemistry, and attended medical school for a year before deciding she would rather write about medicine than practice it. She completed an M.A. in medieval English history at UCLA while writing her first two novels and working as an instructional designer for the Los Angeles Police Academy, and continued her police work for another ten years before shifting to full-time writing.

In addition to her many works in the Deryni universe, beginning with Deryni Rising and now numbering nearly a score, she has written several novels of the sort she refers to as “crypto-history”: the secret story behind what is written in the history books. These include an occult thriller set during the Battle of Britain (Lammas Night) and the American War for Independence (Two Crowns for America). There was also a science fiction novel thrown in there (Legacy of Lehr), and a modern fantasy set in present-day Dublin (St. Patrick's Gargoyle). Partnered with Deborah Turner Harris, she has also written five books for Ace in her Adept series of occult detective thrillers, set in present-day Scotland, plus two books exploring the Scottish War of Independence, dealing with the Knights Templar, the Stone of Destiny, William Wallace, and Robert the Bruce. She has also edited three anthologies of short stories about the Templars.

After twenty-one years resident in Ireland, where she was a neighbor of the late Anne McCaffrey, Ms. Kurtz returned to the United States, where she lives in a historic house in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley with her husband, writer/producer and professional herald Scott MacMillan, many cats, and two exceedingly silly-looking Basset hounds. Her first novel, Deryni Rising, was optioned by Sony Entertainment for Columbia Pictures. Lammas Night was optioned in 2014 and is currently in set-up. She has recently begun work on the next Deryni novel.